LegalOps Highlight: News, Trends and LegalTech Updates Vol. 2

The LegalOps Highlight is a bi-weekly blog series that features relevant news, market trends and legal technology updates from the legal ecosystem. The content is curated from legal and business trade publications, consulting and analyst firms, and Onit | SimpleLegal partners, customers and subject matter experts. Be sure to subscribe and follow Onit and #LegalOpsHighlight on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates!

Highlights

Legaltech News: 5 Ways Law Departments Can Drive Organizational Change
Change is constant, but managing that change, be it innovation, mergers and acquisitions, or budget cuts is possible and necessary. Kevin Clem, Chief Commercial Officer at HBR Consulting reports his analysis on a recent survey taken at ACCXchange, and his insights can help organizations keep their leadership, communication and goal setting strong in the face of major shakeups. HBR Consulting is one of Onit’s industry partners and we believe these tips can help any company facing major law department changes.

CLOC: 3 Reasons RFPs are the Secret Answer to Your Law Department’s AFA Woes
Law departments have been reluctant to run RFPs because they believe that engaging outside counsel is best for easier and more repeatable matters and not suitable for their more complicated commercial litigation matters. David Falstein, Director of Client Strategy and Success at PERSUIT (an Onit industry partner) argues that part of the reason why firms engage in competitive bidding for these matters is because firms are hungry for them and believe they can produce the most competitive rate, which is ultimately easier than dealing with complex AFAs later in the engagement. At the very least, running an RFP process gives the client important insights about the ambiguity of their projects and has the potential to give clients important leverage on billing to help them save millions on their largest and most complex matters.

Corporate Counnsel: Expert Says New European Whistleblower Protections ‘Leave the US in the Dust’
While whistleblowers in the US have come under attack for their recent reporting of alleged political corruption, the EU parliament passed sweeping new protections for whistleblowers, which must now be taken back to member countries to adopt into their own laws. The highlights of the new protections include strengthened protections against retaliation, more support from the EU in legal actions and a shift in the burden of proof to the employer. These new EU laws are reportedly much stronger than any protections or laws set in place in the US and aim to much more effectively protect those working to uncover crime and abuse of power within their organizations.

Law.com: More Than 100 Law Firms Have Reported Data Breaches. And the Problem Is Getting Worse
If there’s anything your IT departments try to drill into every employee’s head, it’s that anybody is at risk for a data breach, and everyone should be extra careful because malicious actors have a number of ways to compromise your security. In the first entry in a series on data breaches, Law.com staff writers Christine Simmons, Xiumei Dong and Ben Hancock detail how the rising reported number of data breaches signals a much larger data security issue. Hackers are only getting better at identifying which ingress points are the easiest targets for breaching. This article can help you and your personnel wise up on the most common methods hackers employ to break down your information security measures.

Above the Law: The Legal AI Efficacy Interview Series: Jim Michalowicz of TE Connectivity
AI has been thrown around as a feature of a lot of products made to make lawyers’ lives easier, but if the consumer tech industries have taught us anything, it’s that sometimes the product doesn’t match the hype. In this first entry in a series of abridged interviews presented on Above the Law, Brad Blickstein, publisher of the Legal AI Efficacy Report, interviews Senior Manager of Legal Operations at TE Connectivity about how implementing AI at TE Connectivity helped them reduce cycle time by 67%. The full interview, linked in the article, details TE’s selection process, how they dealt with issues and change management and their next steps in their process.

ABA Journal: The Secret to Successful Lawyer Leadership
Leadership is a skill most won’t learn through schooling alone, but it’s no secret that the most successful attorneys and business people have taken a crash course or two. Author Liam J. Montgomery details how feedback is one of the keys to successful leadership and lends us experiences from his days in the US Navy that pinpoint the best ways to give feedback. Ultimately, giving people in your organization the feedback they need when they need it is the most certain way to get the best performance from your whole organization.